We have written several times about how the use of overwhelming force on new fires can sometimes keep a small fire from becoming a megafire. We called it “Dr.” Gabbert’s prescription and defined it like this:
Rapid initial attack with overwhelming force using both ground and air resources, arriving within the first 10 to 30 minutes when possible.
The strategy has also been used successfully in fighting wars. During the 1991 campaign into Kuwait to evict Saddam Hussein’s invading forces, General Norman Schwarzkopf who was in charge of the overall effort worked with Air Force Colonel John A. Warden, head of the Directorate of Warfighting Concepts in the Pentagon, to develop the plans. Their strategy utilized overwhelming force including five weeks of aerial attacks before committing ground troops.
Below is an excerpt from The Art of the Strategist: 10 Essential Principles for Leading your company to Victory by William Cohen:
For the first time in history, a ground campaign was preceded by an extensive air campaign developed on Warden’s new model. The campaign, implemented by [Lieutenant General Chuck] Horner’s hand picked chief planner, then Brigadier General Buster Glossom, resulted in a decisive defeat for Hussein, and without a doubt, saved thousands of allied casualties.
During the aggressive 100-hour assault, the United States deployed about 540,000 personnel, of which 148 were killed in action or died of their wounds, according to the Defense Department.
The Holy Grail of Firefighter Safety
Another interesting feature of the Kuwait war that has a parallel to wildland firefighting was reported by the New York Times:
General Schwarzkopf supported the decision [by President George Bush and General Colin Powell to stop the fighting after 100 hours], though it later emerged that amid the confusion on the battlefield not even he knew the precise location of some of the attacking American units.
Often on a wildland fire, the Division Supervisors, Operations Section Chiefs, Planning Section Chiefs, and Incident Commanders do not know the precise location of some of the firefighters and/or the exact location of the fire front.
This has led to fatalities.
Since October 25, 2013 we have been writing about what we call the Holy Grail of Firefighter Safety — a system that could track firefighters AND the location of the fire in real time. We envision that the data could be monitored by a Safety Officer, Operations Section Chief, or Division Supervisor to ensure that firefighters are safe relative to the location of the fire. It is our position that in the last 10 years the lives of 24 firefighters could have been saved by a system like this. On the 2006 Esperanza Fire and the 2013 Yarnell Hill Fire, the supervisors of the firefighters that were killed thought their personnel were in a different location than where they met their demise. If we go back further, for example to the 2005 Cramer Fire and others over the last couple of decades, we could probably add to the list.
Articles on Wildfire Today tagged Holy Grail of Firefighter Safety.
My background is military, not firefighting but to the extent that the problem is getting people and things where you need them, agreeing on what needs to be done, and coordinating a common effort; then firefighting and military operations are very similar.
I live in the middle of Colorado’s WUI tinderbox on the front range so I have followed the debate on firefighting for some time with my military experience and bias. If what you are doing is not improving things [ I can make an argument that things aren’t improving] … then change something.
“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.” Albert Einstein
I participated in a very similar long term debate on adoption of technology during my military career. What Bill is suggesting above in his article resembles a continuously evolving system collectively adopted by the military. Look up things like blue force tracker, JTIDS, and similar C4ISR systems.
To paraphrase Sgt. Stryker played by John Wayne: Life is tough, but it’s tougher if you don’t fight smarter.
Advances in technology have greatly reduced the cost of developing C4ISR systems for firefighting. I believe the Colorado initial effort / experiment with their multi-mission aircraft and COWIMS certainly resembles the military C4ISR concept and military system that works. More importantly, it changes the “experiment” Einstein was referring to. Maybe we’ll see new and better results in Colorado.
Have thought about “what we do”
BTDT …..got out to finish a degree….hit the age limit …went where I could with fire…
Now seeing all these goodies for SA…great let try it..and while we are it ….lets not get people into situations with impending large thunderstorms and shifting winds….which I have experienced like a number of you……maybe I just got lucky with my crews…do not know.
Sure let’s try technology…but when it becomes the end all …then we had better consider the old cranium backup
Unless….that is asking too much in this day in age!!
I agree with, Paul
It has already been proven with the training environments with civil airlines and genereal aviation that an over dependence on technology has already proven the erosion of common stick and rudder skills in flying and that the brain and motor skills of hand eye coordination and muscle memory have to work in conjunction
Same with firefighting…over reliance on gadgetry will erode common judgement skills especially in the SA of what is being encountered
Now…where in the hell is my iPhone, iPad, laptop, SPOT device, my BK or Relm radio that I have to reprogram every years, is there a socket to plug into at the closest Englemann spruce…. where in hell did my brain just go…!!!!
That’s the simplistic “solution” — the low hanging fruit — to say be smart, don’t get into a life threatening situation. Rely only on your mind.
Or, in other words, keep doing the same thing we’ve done for the last 100 years and hope for a different result. Perhaps firefighters will suddenly stop dying. The reality is, there is a lack of situational awareness on large fires that has killed firefighters. If technology could have saved the lives of 24+ of them, maybe we should give it a try.
There is little danger of wildland firefighters relying on “an over dependence on technology”. Think about what we do. We cut brush and spray water. Knowing the location of the firefighters and the fire is not too much to ask. In 20 years we will look back on this time and wonder why it took so long to provide this basic safety information to firefighters.
The technology stated above already exists, however is currently not being used extensively with wildfire do to many system limitations. While all this technology is great it still does not replace good solid judgement of firefighters made on situational awareness. It is just like the age old fire shelter debate. Just because you carry a fire shelter does that mean that you should take more risk? I love technology, it makes our lives easier and we have more access to information quicker then we have ever before in history. With that said I think we need to be aware that it may be limiting our reliance on the most advanced technology we have, our brain.
Game Changing Electronics; Nice idea, but I would recommend practice getting work done or fighting fire without a Data network that requires electricity. Electricity networks are rather fragile to begin with, then add in a natural disaster/terrorism that may cause blackouts.
Just watch someone that has never been without Internet access suddenly lose access to the web, you need to know how to survive without electricity.
Airborne remote sensing using uncooled bolometer sensors (ie military night vision equipment) has been demonstrated and is accepted as standard for military operations. Extending this technology to high temperature flaming targets was done years ago, and mapping active wildfires is something that I’ve been doing as part of my Forest Service job for years. It’s use is limited by a lack of support from the fire aviation establishment (we haven’t had a plane to put the system on for years) and the difficulty in communicating the resulting fire intelligence data (maps) to the people that can use it.
It’s being tried in Colorado (link here- http://fireaviation.com/2014/07/31/colorado-to-buy-two-multi-mission-aircraft-for-aerial-firefighting/) and can be extended nationally if the decision-makers wanted it.
With the technologies in GPS, avalanche beacons, lio-ion batteries, modern radios, smart phones and tablets I think the first half of your Holy Grail, firefighter tracking, is quite feasible technically. I strongly suspect the problem is a combination of money, and oversight. The cost of these technologies has come down, but they’re not free. New radios with built in tracking, simple tracking beacons as backup or for firefights w/o radios, and the systems to display said info in airborne, command center and mobile environments don’t grow on trees. It will take some degree of centralized management to ensure interoperability and get some economies of scale.
I can’t speak to the second half of your Holy Grail, fire location tracking and dissemination, but I suspect it is a harder nut to crack. The dissemination aspect should come along with part one, but tracking location of an uncooperative target (fire) is always more difficult than with a cooperative one (firefighters).
It is obvious to me that such a system, or set of systems, would greatly improve effectiveness, efficiency and safety of wildfire fighting.
Bill, you said in your article above “It is our position that in the last 10 years the lives of 24 firefighters could have been saved by a system like this.”
With respect to the Yarnell Hill Fire and the 19 men who died therein, how do you think a GPS tracker could have saved their lives? Could you please provide more explanation on your thinking on this?
Thank you.
Mr. or Ms. “Question”: We have answered that inquiry several times before. One example is my reply to a comment on the article about a possible “game changing” device to enhance situational awareness for firefighters. Scroll down to see the comment.